Ever since in every shop I visit I push for two screens to be the default configuration of any computer. Large screens are great, but there are real practical limits where a larger screen doesn’t do much for productivity, but a second screen will. The best part is that two modest sized screens are invariably cheaper than the same number of pixels in a large screen due to manufacturing cost.

Bring On the Workspace

The primary advantage of two or more screens is they are a very cost effective way of increasing the amount of information your users can see at one time. For between $200 and $400, you can add a 19″ LCD flat panel to a system. With that, users can do several tasks much easier:

1. Comparisons: When you want to compare two things, say two Word documents or spreadsheets, it’s generally ideal to have twice as much desktop area as you normally use for just one. This allows you to interact with each the way you’re used to without having to adjust to navigation and toolbars being in the wrong place because you’re cramming things into a size you don’t normally use (and the document may not be oriented for.
2. Active and Background tasks: A great use of multiple screens is to have one for your active working task and another for background tasks you are monitoring. For example, put Outlook on a secondary screen and your main task (say development, writing an article, or analyzing a spreadsheet) on your main screen. In this configuration, it’s important that your main screen is directly in front of you and your secondary screen is off to the side where it won’t be distracting.

Why Not Just Bigger?

Why not just get one larger monitor? There are a few advantages to multiple displays.

1. Maximize Behavior: When you maximize a window, it goes to the dimensions of the monitor it’s on. This makes it really easy to move windows from screen to screen quickly because you just need to maximize it then drag it, it will size to the full extent of the target window. Get to love maximize – if you can see the background, you’re not displaying as much information as you could.
2. Too big is too big: You should be able to see the entire extent of your screen without moving your head and really without moving your eyes a lot. The entire screen should be in your peripheral vision. With very large screens, you’ll tend to find that you don’t use all the screen because some is too far to the left or right for comfort. This is particularly an issue with the latest very large widescreen monitors (over 24 inches diagonally). If you find that you just can’t use the entire screen, then that monitor is just too big, you really should have another.
3. Optimize for Purpose: Instead of accepting just one generally good shape and set of capabilities you can optimize different screens for different uses. When using two screens, I like to have my primary be a 24″ widescreen and my secondary be a 20″ normal aspect ratio. This fits well with my normal set of activities where I want some extra width for my primary activities but I find that I like the normal ratio for my background task screen where I leave Outlook and put things like online help windows, web sites I’m monitoring, etc. I worked with a quality assurance manager who had three screens with the center one in portrait orientation which fit her work very well – she would have the application being tested on one screen, the QA tracking application on another, and her email or other background window on a third.

Common Objections

The most common objection, particularly from people that aren’t used to working with multiple screens, is that it’s too expensive. This is usually because the cost is viewed as a percentage of increase to new computer cost. From that standpoint it looks significant – if your shop tries to keep individual computers in the $1500 range (which is very easy in the current market for a typical desktop) this will increase the cost by around $250, closing in on 20%! Why, that would require that you increase your budget for desktop PC purchases by 20%, who’s going to pay for that?

This objection completely ignores both the total cost of ownership of a computer and, more importantly, the value of the computer as a tool to the user. A second screen adds very little to the TCO over one screen (LCD monitors are low support cost items) so if you looked at the entire cost of the PC over its life – say $5000 – this cost is much more reasonable.

A second objection is that users will not use it for productivity gains but to instead couple non-work activities with work time or in general just not be able to make effective use of the space.  While users may become very successful on their own with multiple screens, some quick orientation on how to make the best use multiple screens will pay off with users changing how they work with applications to take advantage of the new capability.  If you don’t do this, many will pick it up on their own as they watch their peers.

At the last company I worked at before eSymmetrix, I finally achieved the goal of everyone – even the receptionist – having two screens.  No more was it a privilege for the elite or the engineers; the benefits apply to any information worker so it was done everywhere.

At one point, my sister’s fiancé noticed that my new laptop was running Vista and missed no opportunity to comment on all of the problems with Vista.  Eventually I took the bait and asked how he was handling all of the problems with OS X 10.5. His reaction was that there weren’t any.  When I asked for more specifics, pulling up some reference articles from the net, he downplayed the problems. Along the way he said “well, they did break X Windows. If I’m using many X programs, I have to reboot perhaps a few times a day, but I can handle that.” I think there are few phrases that typify better how we develop an emotional attraction to brands and products that goes well beyond our reasoning.

It’s OK to Be Emotional

Everyone I’ve met has a soft spot for at least a few products and brands. These things hold a special place where we actively want them to succeed and be awesome. Some companies and products, for whatever reason manage to cultivate this feeling in more people: Probably the gold standard is Apple and perhaps Starbucks. When you relate to a brand this way, you tend to give it the benefit of the doubt and even defend it from anything that might be seen as detracting from it. You will tend to keep this relationship with a brand even if you aren’t a current customer, because this is an emotional attachment, not a rationale evaluation.

For myself, some of the brands I relate to in this way are (in no particular order):  Ford, Volvo, Microsoft, Dell, John Deere, Yamaha (Audio equipment)…  There are also brands that I have the opposite reaction to: I tend to be highly suspicious of their products from the start: Apple, IBM, Oracle, Honda, Toyota… This emotional tie-in with brands is a well known phenomenon that is heavily exploited by product marketing and ultimately is what creates value in a brand itself.

One aspect of how you react to products and brands that you love is that you tend to not want to brook any criticism of the brand or products and have an emotional first reaction before you’ll listen to rationale concerns.  Think about your favorite computer or car brand:  If you hear someone else say something negative about that brand (“Those Honda cars, they’re just underpowered and can’t get moving.”) how do you react?  It’s the intensity of that reaction that lets you know how you relate to that brand.

Conversely, most people have purchased a product against your brand preference. It may be because what you want is out of stock and you can’t wait, or because there is one killer feature you just can’t live without, or some other consideration that manages to overpower your brand loyalty.  When you do, have you had the experience that you are quick to criticize even the smallest detail of the product? It’s natural – you want to reinforce with reasoning your original opinion that was created out of emotion. You’re even more likely to post a blog article or seek out another way to get your critique to the vendor than you would be if it was your preferred brand.

Help the Brands You Love

If you really care about a brand, you should do your best to provide the strongest, most critical feedback for it. In fact, when reviewing survey results or customer feedback within a company it’s the negative feedback that has value. When working within a company, I’m not particularly interested in people that give marks above 80%; that feedback isn’t giving me anything I can work on. What’s interesting is the low marks. What’s really useful are low marks with explanation so I can understand where the person was coming from.

If you want to help the brands you love, look for each opportunity to not give them the benefit of the doubt but instead practice tough love – provide specific, reasoned feedback on what the product needs to do better. Find ways to get it to the people within that brand that can make a difference. In my experience, the folks inside those companies hunger for it, and it has an impact much greater than you expect because these companies are made of people, and their decisions are colored by what evidence they can find to back up what’s being spoken.

Are You Really Extremely Satisfied?

The next time you get a form that asks you to rate your experience from say 1-5 or 1-10, be really honest. While you know that they are looking for everything to be in the top bracket, can you really say that you had an exception or extraordinary experience in every category? While that may do well for some internal marketing statistics report, it isn’t really useful to the product engineers behind the product.

When I bought my last car, I was really honest: I had high expectations of the dealership, and they met them – that meant when it asked did we meet or exceed your expectations, they.. met them. I got a call from a regional marketing rep later wanting to know why I had given them low marks. Two things happened from this: I was able to explain to them that I had high expectations and why (the dealership had done very well in the past for me) and personally comment on a few problem areas that really weren’t the dealership’s fault (they didn’t have access to some information to help me that they should have). This helped the brand in a way I’m sure me just checking the 10 box wouldn’t have.

Amazingly enough, I got to test that feature out just a week after putting the server in place – the drive in my wife’s machine tanked out of the blue. Dell shipped us out a new drive that arrived the next day, and I was looking forward to being able to pop in the Microsoft-provided full recovery CD, restore the machine, and have her on her way without any incident. It might be one of my few towering triumphs of home technology.

And Microsoft put some real work into this: They provide the recovery CD, you boot from it and it asks for one password and connects to the server to see what backups are available to be restored. It even prompts you to restore the backups for the local machine which it must be figuring out by MAC address or something (since the drive was absolutely brand new, so nothing to go off there). So far I was pretty impressed.

Then I ran into it, the usability issue I knew had to be there. It refused to run a restore to the new drive because, well, it was new – it wasn’t formatted, so it didn’t know what to do. A dialog popped up informing me that I might want to run disk administrator, which it provides a nice button to start up.

Here’s the thing

I know exactly what to do with disk administrator; I can administer a Windows 2003 server which is basically what WHS is under the covers. I’ve been using Windows NT since, well – it was just NT. So this didn’t throw me personally, but Microsoft is really hoping – and billing – that WHS is a server for the rest of the world - for say my parents to use, and they could use one. The problem is that for all of the work they did to get it this far (and it must have been a lot of work – the recovery CD booted up a special running copy of Vista and went right into a recovery wizard that was, over all, pretty smart) they then dropped the ball completely by not recognizing that a blank drive means… Time for a full system restore. If not, at least do what the OS installation has been doing since… NT 3.1 like prompting “would you like recovery to format the drive?” or something that people will understand.

If my parents had gotten to that point, they would have stopped and had to call me, and that’s pretty much game over from a usability standpoint. I don’t even know if I could easily walk them through how to use disk administrator from scratch to partition and format a drive without seeing the screen.

Close Microsoft, very close. But the home user market really wants choices in plain language to tell them what to do, particularly when recovering from something as traumatic as a complete system failure. Great usability isn’t cheap, but it’s worth it. Here’s the worst part: I’m sure that the WHS team at Microsoft, which by all appearances is pretty smart and had to make a lot of hard choices, had a meeting where they probably debated this point, and taking the time to smooth out this wrinkle reliably lost out. Possibly because it wouldn’t work correctly if the home system was running Turkish windows and had SCSI RAID or some other such boundary case. Too bad. Apple would have taken the time to make it work – an easier task with a lot less hardware variation to support, but making it work right when it’s hard is exactly what people pay for. Do it often enough and you get a reputation for excellence.

My wife’s system was back up and running in no time, overall from her perspective it rocked: Her machine died a rapid, painful death and was back up exactly where she was quickly, having lost only a few hours work. For me, it was another in a line of recent experiences with Windows where it was so good in so many ways that the few cigarette burns and scratches in the finish really stand out.

A Plea to Microsoft

Stop living up to what your detractors say about you. You spend a fortune on getting things right and I know enough to really respect just how hard it is to accomplish what you do. The Microsoft folks I’ve worked with are passionate and take a lot of pride in what they do. Check out the Windows Home Server Team Blog - these folks love what they do. But the Microsoft brand is not known for just working and for being easy enough you can recommend it to your Mom. You can fix this.